I hope work from home continues

Well, allow me to be the first outlier. I typically use two monitors (tried three, didn't really add much to having two, for me); using two external monitors (attached to a laptop) right this second as I type this (and also a proper keyboard and mouse - the laptop to which they are all connected is under the desk, closed).

I am very happy indeed to continue using two monitors at home. A chap on my team uses four monitors on his setup and he's similarly happy to continue doing so from home.

Why do the people you know who like to use multiple monitors want to do so in the office rather than at home in a dedicated work room? Are they, at home, like, actually working ON the laptop? Typing on the little laptop keyboard, using the little laptop mousepad, staring at the little laptop screen?

Going outside, working just off the laptop, is a definite shift. It usually means less coding, but sometimes it pushes me to be productive in areas I normally neglect (documenting, planning, organizing).

To do real development, I am very dependent upon a big monitor. If I travel, I take one or rent one.

Honestly though, sometimes I just go for a walk. And often during that walk, with no screens, my brain magically sorts through some problems and gives me new insights.

If you work from home though, most people agree on dedicating some space and properly equipping it. Working always only on a laptop in a floater kind of way is something that I suspect most people cannot do with any real level of productivity.

I hate working on a laptop screen.

OTOH, I like the 34” ultrawide monitor I use at home attached to my dock better the twin 21” widescreens I had in the office, plus I get to use it, rather than a laptop, in the numerous meetings-with-computers, which were held in meeting rooms with in-person work.

I don't doubt that adding screen estate has value, but in the minimalistic spirit, anything added also subtracts something :) And in the same spirit, anything subtracted adds something else - in my case, the ability to work more efficiently.

Try to work on a single screen for a relatively long time (say, a few months). Over the time, you'll develop (because you're forced to) more efficient habits.

Yet the last year has changed my mind. I have a 15" MBP from 2015 that is fine. My home office has an iMac, so I really don't want a second monitor crowding my desk. I just use the laptop's display and keyboard. Less stuff to worry about finding space for, or keeping the cats from fucking with.

And best of all, when work is done, I log out of the VPN, and close the lid. Of course I have Teams/Outlook on my phone if there's an emergency, but there's also a clear delineation for my family to recognize; if the laptop is open, I'm still working. If it's closed, then they can talk/pester/joke with me without worrying about my work. And it also helps me remember to not overwork.

https://www.asus.com/us/Displays-Desktops/Monitors/ZenScreen...

I bought a 43" (4K 3840 x 2160) and put an older (rotated) 24" right next to it - the setup works perfectly contrary to my initial worry of the main display proving to be too big. Advantage of the 43" display over an ultra-wide is that I get plenty of vertical space as well in addition to the horizontal space. That means easily having 4 80-column tall IDE windows side by side for reduced scrolling. Another advantage is that videos play full screen without any black areas on the sides. The smaller monitor is split between Slack and email - both always visible but not too distracting due to being in the peripheral vision.

I can understand why people who are working from their kitchen table want to go back to the office, but for those that have a dedicated work area, wouldn't they set it up the way they want?

I have a multi-monitor setup at home that's better than what I have at work since I'm not limited to IT approved hardware. Related, I also have a loud clicky keyboard that I can't get away with using at work since everyone in the shared office area can hear it.

There's no way I'd be allowed this much equipment and space in the office. I had a nice-ish 27' monitor there and a small desk crammed next to another developer.

As much as I miss the social aspects of an office, WFH has a lot of benefits. I realize this is not true for many, and a lot of my own money went into the office of my dreams here. But it's quite comfortable.

I doubt it lasts, at least in software. Talented people are going to have lots of remote options making it harder to find good people willing to show up for daily cubicle warfare.

I was someone who preferred to be in the office every day prior to the pandemic. But after adjusting, I really, really like working from home. Truth is, I can't imagine I'll ever take another job that expects me to show up to an actual office everyday. I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Informal communication, informal collaboration, a culture of apprenticeship. To the extent that the organization values these they are all served much better in person than remote.

All companies and all people are different. There isn't a one size fits all. But it's not like there are no benefits to in person.

Hot take: There's a whole way of communicating and handling team organization that grew up around 20th century business management culture, and it just doesn't work well with remote teams. Methods that do work well with remote teams, though, don't work well with traditional deeply hierarchical management structures. At best, they tend to make all those management layers somewhat superfluous.

This means getting people back into the office may be a matter of self-preservation for career managers, whether they realize it consciously or not.

Beliefs and dogma. Amazon's justification was "Amazon is an in-office culture." That ultimately boils down to circular reasoning; the key decision maker (whoever they are) has demonstrated an immense lack of critical reasoning. Continuing this practice is in the same realm as continuing other hostile workplace traditions, although it is one of the less serious ones.

In my opinion, it is wasting a lot of money in the form of productivity. Every employee who commutes to the office has an overwhelmingly high likelihood of having some of their mental resources drained. You're wasting a good hour or two of superior employee performance in the morning, and possibly some near the end of the day when employees start dreading the journey home.

> biggest factor is creating a culture of inclusion

This is a very important point. One of the major ongoing reasons that women are passed over for promotions is that they are the traditional/dogmatic caregivers. Home-first equalizes this, much like paternal leave does. If a home is unable to afford child-care, then men have just as much responsibility and distraction during work hours.

Some people may struggle to afford commute, for example, people escaping homelessness. Being able to work from home would reduce the burden on these people.

In addition, those who cannot causally/physically complete their job offsite (doctors, construction workers, tellers, baristas) won't have roads and public transport congested with people who have no business traveling to work.

> Dedicated offices were set up as "conference rooms"

We need conference rooms as an API. I should be able to add (and be billed for) a physical room to a meeting request as easily as adding a Zoom/GMeet - for when in-person collaboration is really needed. WeWork was in the ideal position to do this, it's a pity they doubled down on big corporate clients instead of "gig economy rooms."

Because most managers have a reactionary style of management. They are like IRQ handlers. Their state doesn't change until they receive an email from their boss or a phone call from a customer. At that point they react to it by running down the hall to find someone. Now, because they do not understand cooperative multitasking they preemptively interrupt YOU and now your day is f*cked.

Will they though? If some companies don't, that will be a major reason to change jobs for the better employers (who value your flexibility).

Only reasons I can think of is as follows. - Someone in the CEO's direct reports is tasked with making a decision. - They start a survey on how satisfied the managers are on the work performance. - The survey does not go to individual employees. - Rightfully, the survey results wildly support return-to-office. - Decision is made.

Some other company may decide to be data driven, and use metrics which may or may not fully reflect the tradeoffs between work-from-home vs. office.

Or, the top leader makes the decision for the rest of the company. No questions allowed.

> Cost issues aside, I've always maintained that the absolute best experience is a hybrid/flexible schedule and location policy.

Agree. This should be the way.

1. Personally, working from home has been a mixed bag. When I'm allowed to focus on one single task, I can do pretty well. The comforts of having my own office room, high quality monitors, keyboard and speakers listening to music are very nice. The additional latency accessing my remote workstation not so great (and that is required, because of company rules not allowing source access outside of corp network). Also, anything that required a lot of human interaction has been pretty bad, video conferencing is a poor substitute, I've found (as someone who doesn't really enjoy socializing) and depending on where you are in the project (is the team already established, do they know each other IRL, the tasks are clear or are you just starting a new team for a new project, scoping up tasks and everything) it requires more or less interaction. At the beginning of a project there is a ton of little details that get missed in the initial plans which can be resolved very fast in person and which always seem to resolve slower remotely, no matter how good use we attempt to make of all the tools available (team chat, video conference, etc). As such, whenever my company asked in WFH surveys how I would rate my productivity, I always rated it lower than 100%, around 60%-70%. In terms of commute, it's a wash-off: yes, I don't spend time commuting now but the extra time I have I just spend it in longer videogame sessions at night (so not exactly the best/most healthy way to use that extra time) and when I was commuting to the office I'd often commute by bike (at about 100 miles biked per week) while now I barely bike a third of that because I force myself to get out on the bike every weekend to at least have some physical activity.

2. Company wide, based on the the surveys done, it seems most people have rated their productivity lower than when in office. As such, it is no surprise to me that the company is looking at an accelerated schedule to get people back in office.

But when you're trying to build a small company, one approach is to make it feel like a family. And families always have people we like and people we like not so much. But there's something special about one unit working toward a single goal.

My design is for a startup with young people. This would not work nearly as well for older people and people with their own families!

These could happen during the week or (depending on the retreat) the weekend, with weekends probably being given comp time in lieu.

If you think that a modicum of face time throughout the year for a remote team has no value to a group or team, I’ve got news for you.

If you think GP was referring to additional face time in addition to face time at a workplace, then I think you may be projecting and selective quoting a bit. Note that employees at this small company can work when and where they want.

It helps that the most important aspect of our hiring process is about culture-fit - so much so that the final stage of the (pretty relaxed) hiring process is a presentation to everyone in the company who wishes to attend (regardless of role). Those presentations typically see 40% or more of the company attend. Crucially, every person in that presentation gets the opportunity to vote on whether the candidate is hired.

I've made friends for life at this company.

> We get the whole company together once a year for seven days so that Automatticians can create bonds that influence them all year long. So far we’ve done Grand Meetups in San Francisco, California; La Paz, Mexico; Oracle, Arizona; Breckenridge, Colorado; Mont-Sainte-Anne, Québec; Seaside, Florida; Budapest, Hungary; San Diego, California; Santa Cruz, California; Park City, Utah; Whistler, Canada; and Orlando, Florida.

> In addition to our all-company Grand Meetup, teams meet for five to seven days to brainstorm team-level strategy and bond in locales ranging from Boulder to Buenos Aires, Las Vegas to Lisbon, Montréal to Mexico City, and Vienna to Vietnam. If you join our merry band, expect to travel three to four weeks per year.

> As a distributed company we also know how to connect with each other from afar, and consider day-to-day social communication at least as important as breaking bread in person.

https://automattic.com/how-we-work/

But! If remote is the new way, then we don't have to live in the city center. Especially in nice countries with good train systems, we can live in more distant places where rents are cheaper and we can have an entire place with yard to spare. I'm in NL, and I have about 150 square meters of indoor space plus a big yard for less than 800 eur. Previously I spent 700 for 35sq meters and no yard. The difference now is that I'm in a village 2.5 hours from Amsterdam. As long as there are trains, I can go to the office on occasion.

Nope, definitely not a call center. In fact only team leads and higher have phones.

> someone on HN needs to hire this guy,

I wish. GED + 15 years doing a job that doesn't translate to much of anything else doesn't help one's jobs prospects sadly.

I hope you left that shithole company and glassdoored their management hard.

Companies will be fined for this kind of environment and the office will be closed if things aren’t improved. You can’t choose to not care.

I don’t know where you live, but I can assure you that what you’re describing is not “just life” in most developed countries. You’re not describing a normal office.

Offices like you describe continue to exist because employees put up with it. The tech job market is very hot right now. I would strongly encourage you to explore your options. What you’re describing is not normal or acceptable.

You don’t need to move to a Google type company with unlimited office budgets. Most companies are smart enough to know they need to address things like broken HVAC or not enough microwaves or unclean bathrooms by spending the relatively tiny amount of money to address the problem. It’s literally cheaper to address these issues than to lose good talent over such easily addressable frustrations.

When you move to a company that treats employees decently, you’ll find that you also get along with coworkers better because everyone is not already miserable and dreading their jobs.

I'm not a leisure cyclist. I don't dress up in spandex and ride an expensive bike. In fact, I have difficulty containing my derision for leisure cyclists. I know that the equipment they use has utility, but it also signals: I don't have to ride a bike. I have an expensive SUV at home, and I didn't lose my drivers license to a DUI.

I don't want to be unfriendly, but I'm at work to get shit done because I'm getting paid. If someone wants to talk hobbies, we can do that another time.

It would require a commute longer than that of going to the office. An average employee has already organized their life around the necessity of commuting to the office. Office is probably a central location.

Most workers will be found within a circle of the tolerable commute time (isotropy assumption). Let for simplicity assume that all workers live at the same distance R from the office, and are distributed uniformly along that circle. The angular distance between any two employees is distributed uniformly in [0, pi]. Chord length is R 2 sin (theta/2). Integrating, we calculate the average distance between two employees: 4R/pi > R.

On the plus, many more lunches with spouse and children.

In my office, nobody really bats an eye if someone decides that they're too sleepy to be productive and just takes a short nap.

*raises hand* the hybrid model of WFH is likely to revert to everyone back in the office as people realise that those that go into the office have an advantage over remote employees via side of desk conversations, building rapport with management and the general perception that those in the office are "working harder".

I've worked from home through 3 toddlers, and very rarely had a problem. But I've worked from home for their whole lives.

This is probably something harder to transition into. Kids only really know what you introduce to them. If you've worked from home their whole lives they don't know anything different. If they're used to mommy working from home and them not being able to play with her, then they pretty much accept it.

We never tried to explain, we just said: mommy is at work, you cannot play with her, you can see her at lunch/after work.

Wouldn't full time WFH make that easier to do? Presumably you live in a small one bedroom apartment because it's within commute distance of work. If your employer stuck with WFH, then you could move to a house in a small town, probably for less money than you're paying for the apartment.

Our office opened last week and I've been back in every day (and am sitting here now).

For me, going back into the office has nothing to do with my social life. Even prior to the pandemic, for the last 4 years, I've had the option to WFH as much as I wanted and I was still in office 3-4 days a week. I feel less productive at home and I miss having the division between work and home. My commute is my wind down time that allows me to turn my brain off work mode at the end of the day.

I think after COVID is gone, the name of the game will be flexibility. Treat people like adults and, as long as they're getting their work done and not negatively affecting the team, we should let them work where and when they want.

First, productivity concerns are (mostly) an excuse. The real important thing that is desired is to be able to exert managerial control over employees. This is more easily done when you have employees in the office under watchful eyes.

Second, in an ideal world the people that like the office will commute to the office, and the people that like WFH will WFH.

The prefer-WFH people don't lose out either way from such a setup. However the prefer-office people still lose out, if, for example, the majority of a team chooses prefer WFH. What happens to all the social and organizational benefits of working in the office if you're in a team of 10 and only 3 people choose to come to the office? Or worse - if you're the only one? So it becomes an all or nothing scenario.

This! I don't get how HN, a community of hackers who can't but be aware of FLOSS, could claim with a straight face that "remote doesn't work" in the face of things like LKML.

I think there are a lot of "implicit" benefits of being in-person that remote companies need to make more "explicit" to be successful. It sounds like your company has the right idea!

To be quite sincere, I've heard this before. And it ALWAYS ends like Animal Farm. Some are "more equal" than others, especially if your company has the usual upper management.

Interns we've on-boarded, especially from non-CS background programs, all have had these kinds of issues.

It's been getting better, but I don't see how it's possible to have anything close to "real" mentor-ship schemes with full WFH. When I was interning most of learning happened not with my project but with interacting with the team and seeing/understanding what they did.

I have a sneaking feeling that the productivity boosts due to WFH mostly come from more senior devs w/ specific workstreams that are benefiting from more "head down" time, but without mentoring/training new ppl the quality hiring pool will go down over time.

A lot of people look at in-office through the lens of entire companies or at least pretty much everyone they interact with being co-located. I, on the other hand, am on a broader team spread over about 9 time zones and, on a given day, I can be talking with people in 5 different offices plus remote/traveling. If I went into a local office pre-pandemic, there was a good chance I wouldn't run into anyone I knew.

While people say "oh just move somewhere else outside the city", unfortunately that means i need to now buy/maintain a car on top of everything else. Then commute into the city to be social with my friends group, or to do physical activities.

Neither of those things appeal to me, and since our work is strongly leaning to switching to be fully remote, it is kind of frustrating. A bunch of coworkers are very much just move to a city where you can buy a house! That is what i did. Or even worse a lot of people who are just "buy a house!", and are completely ignorant of how insane the housing prices have become.

Honestly the end result is probably just going to lead to me finding employment at a company that still has the ability to work onsite. A few of my like mininded coworkers pitched the idea that we could rent a small office area for people like us, and were promptly shot down by management.

I've loved it so far, being able to be around family more and take care of them and just be around.

If full-time remote becomes more the norm, I hope people are able to take the opportunity to be closer to family and friends.

Not to mention that a pandemic is not an accurate reflection of what real remote work looks like.

It is the job of senior devs to make new employees feel like part of the team.

It absolutely does. Point is a lot of industries never formalized training, instead relying on osmosis across teams. That creates a--hopefully temporary--disadvantage for new hires. Again, in some fields.

This is a big problem. More often than not "institutional knowledge" is short hand for "I'm too lazy to write this down, hope I don't get hit by a bus!"

People pretend like writing wasn't invented thousands of years ago.

This seems lost on most people but is painfully clear if you read post histories. For instance, most of /r/childfree (an interesting topic no doubt) is a younger sister overexposed to her parents' excitement (because she's living at home) about older sister's kid. Most of /r/QAnonCasualties is the same sort of angst, directed at parents. Most city subs are the same way, edgy "right wing" guy turns out to live with his dad, who he's parroting. It's incredible that the site is taken any more seriously than 4Chan; there ought to be some great business studies on Reddit's "teflon" nature.

I also have seen productivity issues between two office locations that are suddenly resolved by having someone travel to the other site for a week. Sometimes this is even followed up with an writeup about the sudden revelations gleaned from the visit.

On the other hand, I’ve also seen engineers take vacation days so they can be heads down on a project they care about. So, I’m not sure what the ideal situation is, exactly.

they can't make you put your butt in a seat!

There's the fairly normal things like charging for lunch at the office canteen (fine, but for a big tech company this is a little different), the slightly odd things like charging for parking at their office (seems like an easy win to not bother?), and then there's the downright crappy ("your role entitles you to 4GB RAM in your laptop, even though Excel needs much more, if you want more buy it yourself").

I think there are better companies to use as role models for creating a good working environment.

While they may have been great at some point, they're largely carried by a few segments of their businesses and can no longer really fail. Google is mostly carried by their success in ads, and most of the non-ads things they pump out + the way they do it, is mediocre at best, extremely inefficient at worse. Their technological innovations are mostly meant to support these inefficiencies. Sure some stuff they do is cool, but they do a LOT of stuff. Most isn't. The same applies to all these other companies.

This is about those times when you can still work. Most people come into work whenever they can, even if they are carrying an infectious virus. That needs to stop. If you are sick but can still work, you should work from home.

If I have to make a mad dash to the toilet every few minutes, then working isn't practical. If I'm burning up with fever and feel like a truck hit me, working isn't practical.